The next morning’s breakfast was the last color-coded meal, and it sparked a realization of all the last things coming up. This was the last morning of Color War. After that would be the last few days of classes. Tonight, he and his bunkmates would learn their last digit of Pi. And Saturday was the last day of Summer Center. Six weeks of camp, over in a blink.
Gabe got a round of applause when he presented the red sand to C2 during the designated scavenger hunt time. Maybe it was because he didn’t want his teammates to know that he’d helped a Blue team member, or maybe it was because he was taking a cue from C2, who accepted the cup of sand without asking any questions, but Gabe decided to keep most of the details about his journey private. Nikhil thought it safer if he didn’t know the specifics of how his bunkmate broke the rules, and Wesley was impressed just knowing that it happened at all, so it wasn’t too hard. Gabe had a flash of nervousness when he passed Amanda on the field, but all she did was shout, “Blue is the best!” When Jenny stuck her tongue out at him, he knew that Amanda hadn’t told anyone about last night either.
The Color War battles ended with the scavenger hunt in the morning, but the official closing ceremony wasn’t until after dinner. The administration spent the day tallying the scavenger hunt scores and divvying up points for sportsman-ship and team spirit, and the campers had shortened sessions of each of their classes. They were only going to have two more days of school after this, and both Miss Carey and Mr. Justice said that those two days would be spent working on a final project to present to their families when they came to pick them up.
The return to school was like the landing of another UFO: the focus and atmosphere of the whole camp shifted instantly. Instead of scoreboards and giant maps and mud pits, the camp became filled with rocket launchpads and soil samples and even the beginnings of a replica of a medieval village. The excitement and competitive spirit was still there; it was just redirected.
Gabe sat on a tree stump, his hair brushed forward and flipped up in the front, thinking about his final poem. Mr. Justice had taken the class out to the woods for inspiration, but Gabe’s wasn’t coming. He knew he wanted to write about camp, but that could mean anything that happened in the last six weeks. It was so big that he didn’t know how to start, and he had no idea which of all his memories were even worth writing about.
He’d had the same mental blank when thinking about his final logic proof. All he could think about was the personal logic proof he’d been working on all summer. He’d thought that all his adventures would prove that he wasn’t a nerd, but they presented a stronger case for the opposite. Summer Center was one big adventure in geekdom. But was there any truth in what Amanda said? Did the geekdom part not necessarily cancel out the adventure?
Mr. Justice knelt down beside Gabe’s stump. “How’s it coming, Gabe?”
Gabe sighed. “I don’t know what to write.”
“Do you know which form you’d like to write in?” Mr. Justice asked. The final poem could be any type of poem they’d studied, and they’d studied lots.
“No,” Gabe said. “Maybe a haiku or a sonnet.”
Mr. Justice smiled. “You like meter.”
Gabe nodded. He did like poems that had set rules about how many lines or words or syllables you could use. “You have to make it fit,” he said. “Like the old wooden puzzles I had when I was little. There was this board with the outline, and you had to figure out which pieces went where to make it come together. Writing those poems is kind of like that.”
Mr. Justice nodded. “Kind of like a logic problem.”
“Yeah,” Gabe said slowly. “It is kind of like a logic problem. …” Mr. Justice stood up and went to check in with someone else, leaving Gabe with all the neurons in his brain beginning to fire.
He had a flashback of Amanda last night, sitting opposite him in her kayak and saying, You always look at things backward. He could think of his poem like a logic problem … and his logic proof like a poem. Solving a logic problem meant taking a whole bunch of facts—givens—and combining them to come to one solution. But writing a poem was the opposite: You took a big thing—the woods, say—and broke it down into small things—the smell of the leaves, the sound of the wind.
Instead of looking at his nerd chart as a set of facts that needed to prove one thing or another, he began to look at it as a collection of memories and moments. When camp was over, he wouldn’t have just one conclusion, he’d have all these fun and funny and crazy experiences. He could combine them to prove all sorts of different things or make any type of poem. And he’d remember every one of them—they were all him, more than any hairstyle was. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be looking back at his logic proof anymore.
Amanda walked behind Gabe’s stump and looked over his shoulder at his blank piece of paper. “I’m almost done already,” she bragged.
Gabe looked up. “I’m just starting to get it.”